Climate Change and the "Confidence Trap": A Podcast with Roger Cooke

In a new podcast, RFF Senior Fellow Roger Cooke discusses the "confidence trap" and how it distorts the debate about how to respond to the threat of climate change.

We also touch on the ways that the burden of proof is "gerrymandered" in favor of climate skeptics and the role that expert judgment and uncertainty quantification can play in clarifying the issues at stake.​

The views expressed in RFF blog posts are those of the authors and should not be attributed to Resources for the Future.

RFF’s Roger Cooke discusses the confidence trap and how current conversations about climate change misallocate the burden of proof. Cooke was a lead author of the chapter on risk and uncertainty in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report.

The urgent need to look beyond short-term setbacks in US climate policy should spur greater collaboration between the financial world and climate economists and scientists to address longer-term financial risks related to climate change.